Monday, October 6, 2014

That Dossier

Now that I have had a little time to reflect on the shocking news about Brenda Leyland that I first heard late last night & read and listen to some of the reports, comments & spin today I have collected my thoughts. Here they are:

1. No one is in a position to say whether Brenda's tweets were illegal as this has not been tested in court.

2. Everyone has the right to express their opinion as long as doing so falls within the law.

3. The dossier was compiled by persons who wish to remain anonymous to the wider world. They had every right to compile their dossier & if they believed they had unearthed illegal activity to pass it on to the police.

4. They also had the right to pass their dossier to and to those who run social media platforms such as twitter and facebook if they believed they had uncovered contraventions of the terms & conditions of those platforms.

4. The dossier compilers DID NOT have the right to give, or worse still sell (I do not know whether it was sold I am simply saying that it would be even worse if it had been sold), the dossier to any media outlet.

5. Any media outlet receiving such a dossier DID NOT have the right to publish the name or any other personal details of anyone named in the dossier.

6. The media did have the right to run a story describing in general terms what was in the dossier and to say that it was in the hands of the police & CPS who were considering whether any laws had been broken and whether anyone should be charged.

7. By publishing the name & image of someone named in the dossier and by calling them a troll & member of a hate campaign the media in general, & SkyNews in particular, contributed enormously to the circumstances that caused Brenda Leyland to kill herself.

8. I am now surprised that I find myself in partial agreement with the "Hacked Off" campaign and G McCann. The media in the UK need to be subject to greater control. Though I disagree about how such control should be achieved.

9. I expect "Hacked Off" & G McCann to publicly condemn the actions of the media with respect to Brenda Leyland in particular and the dossier in general. If they do not they will be revealed as the hypocrites that some people think they are.

10. The people who compiled the dossier should publish, anonymously if they wish, details of exactly to whom they gave the dossier, when this was done and whether any money changed hands. Once again failure to do so will reveal them to be hypocrites.

1 comment:

The Met received the dossier on 9th of September from the MC (according to Bernard Hogen Howe) and took no actions yet. It's fundamental to know how and in which terms that action was communicated to the media.